In doing some research for a completely different project, I came across an article of mine from August 23, 2021:

Haven’t the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed the numbers?

Homicides and shootings in the city have dropped significantly

Posted on August 23, 2021 | 9:05 PM EDT

We have previously noted the recent decrease in the number of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. We noted, on July 9^th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8^th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. If I recall correctly, that 562 number was my highest projection for the year.

But then, as of the 221^st day of the year, 325 homicides had been recorded. 325 ÷ 221 days in the year, = 1.4706 homicides per day, for a projected 537 for the year. That number stayed fairly consistent, as a week later, with ‘just’ 339 homicides in 228 days, Philadelphia was seeing ‘only’ 1.4868 homicides per day, which works out to ‘just’ 543 over the course of 2021.

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 22^nd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 345 homicides in the city. 345 ÷ 234 days = 1.4744 per day, or 538 projected for the year. The big news is that, over the past 31 days, a full month, if not a calendar month, there have been ‘just’ 31 homicides, ‘just’ 1.00 per day. With 131 days remaining in 2021, if that rate could be maintained, there would be ‘only’ 476 killings in Philly for the year. If The Philadelphia Inquirer has noticed that decrease, I haven’t seen it mentioned. It certainly doesn’t seem as though their Editorial Board has noticed.

There’s more at the original. But the line that caught my eye was, “We noted, on July 9th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.”

And 562 it turned out to be!

Between July 9^th and September 6^th, which Labor Day, the homicide rate dropped to 1.4578 per day, which would have worked out to ‘only’ 532 homicides. Sadly, the killing rate increased, and by the end of the year it was back up to 1.5397 per day, and that 562 projection was realized.

As of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, April 24^th, there had been 151 murders in the City of Brotherly Love this year. That’s 4.43% below last year’s pace, when there had been 158 homicides by the end of April 24^th.

As of April 24, 2021, 28.11% of city’s total of 562 murders had been committed. If the same percentage applies this year, Philly would see 537 homicides. The city still has the long, hot summer ahead.

But there’s an obvious question: what if Philadelphia doesn’t have that early July through early September lull this year? During the ‘lull,’ there were still 72 murders in the city, but had the ‘lull’ of 1.2203 homicides per day not occurred, there would have been 91 people killed.

Yes, I’m something of a numbers geek, but projecting things like this will always be somewhat problematic. It is well known that homicides increase as the weather gets warmer, and decrease as it cools down again. Yet, in Philly, the pace of killings picked up in the fall; that’s how the city ‘achieved’ its record of 562 souls sent early to their eternal rewards. A couple of weeks of rain could affect the projections, as could an early, heavy snow. A heat wave might keep the gang bangers inside in the air conditioning, and not out on the streets shooting at people.

Well, the 151 number didn’t even last the morning:

152nd Homicide of 2022 already in Philadelphia this morning 7:20am @PhillyPolice report man,40, shot in back of his head inside Fisher Park off North 5th Street @FOX29philly pic.twitter.com/P1QwIoxXuc

— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) April 25, 2022

The 500 block of West Spencer Street (not Avenue) is not a terrible neighborhood. The area is filled with mostly well-kept attached single-family homes, and North 5th Street is lined with decent-looking two-story businesses with (probable) apartments on the second floor.

Of course, when The Philadelphia Inquirer gets around to reporting it, they’ll remove the race of the victim!

Thus far, under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, Philadelphia has seen the first and third most homicides in its history, with only Mayor Wilson Goode’s — Mayor Goode of MOVE bombing fame! — record of 500 in the crack cocaine wars of 1990 in the middle of that. But I’m guessing that 2022 will see at least a solid second-place finish for Messrs Kenney and Krasner, and Miss Outlaw.

What I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer^[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. doesn’t like to print stories about the murders in the city, because so many of them are one gang-banger, almost always black, shooting another gang-banger, the victim again almost always black. But the newspaper does love to do stories about innocent people being killed, so it is with some surprise it took until Monday for the Inquirer to get around to this story; WPVI-TV, Channel 6, had it on Friday.

A 15-year-old boy, shot in Wissinoming while getting a case of water bottles from his dad’s car, has died

Sean Toomey was shot in the head outside his family’s home on the 6200 block of Mulberry Street.

by Chris Palmer | Monday, March 28, 2022



Sean Toomey, photo from Tweet by Jaclyn Lee, 6ABC News.

A 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head in Wissinoming last week while grabbing a case of water bottles from his father’s car has died, according to his family and Philadelphia police.

Sean Toomey, of the 6200 block of Mulberry Street, was shot around 9:10 p.m. Thursday outside his family’s house on that block, police said.

His aunt, Anna Toomey, said Monday that the teen had been inside the house before going out to retrieve the case of water when he was shot and collapsed on a neighbor’s lawn.

Officers who responded took him to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, where he was initially placed in critical condition. He was pronounced dead on Friday afternoon, police said Monday.

WPVI’s report noted:

That woman called her boyfriend for help and by the time that boyfriend got outside, police say the two suspects ran off – but then shots were fired. Police have ruled out the boyfriend.

“I heard the two pops and I thought it was firecrackers,” said Sean’s father, John. “But it only takes a second to grab some water and get in the house and he wasn’t coming back in. So I got curious, I put my sweatshirt on, and I went outside and I saw him lying on my neighbor’s lawn.”

That’s when Toomey discovered his own son had been shot, once in the head, once in the side.

There’s more at the originals.

Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said on Monday that the police believe that the killing was related to a group of three men who had attempted at least two other robberies in the area just prior to the shooting. Though initial reports stated that young Mr Toomey was struck by bullets fired after the previous robbery attempts, police have not ruled out the possibility that the criminals tried to rob Mr Toomey personally.

Police said three other people were slain over the weekend: A 28-year-old man was found dead from several gunshot wounds on the 400 block of Kingsley Street, in Wissahickon, around 11:50 p.m. Sunday; a 30-year-old man died after being shot on the 800 block of East Willard Street in Kensington around 11 p.m. Sunday; and 33-year-old Eric Sampson, of West Philadelphia, was fatally shot around 12:20 a.m. Friday on the 3500 block of Kensington Avenue in Kensington.

The Inquirer article stated that no arrests have been made in any of the homicide cases.

There have been 120 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, March 27^th. That’s a 3.45% increase over the same date in record-shattering 2021, and 31.87% higher than in 2020, which was second all-time in in city murders with 499. The statistics are too close to state that 2022 will break 2021’s record of 562 homicides, but it seems almost certain that the 500 number will be eclipsed.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, there have been 121 murders through Sunday in the Windy City, one more than in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, but the guesstimated population of Chicago is 2,671,635, while 1,576,251 people live in Philly.

At some point it has to be asked: when will Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw be held accountable for the chaos in Philadelphia? These people have failed, utterly failed, in their jobs.

It was in no way unexpected that the City of Brotherly Love would see its 100^th homicide of the year this week; the only question was on which day that would happen. For a numbers geek like me, it has led to some introspection, but first, the report from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philadelphia reaches 100 homicides for 2022, outpacing last year

More people have been killed in Philadelphia so far this year than by this time last year, which ended with a record 562 homicides.

by Robert Moran | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 7:00 PM EST

Philadelphia has topped 100 homicides so far in 2022, outpacing the number of killings this time last year, which ended as the deadliest in the city’s recorded history.

The 100th victim was a 28-year-old man who was shot multiple times shortly before 11 p.m. Thursday on the 100 block of North 53rd Street in West Philadelphia. The man was rushed by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 12:32 a.m. Friday.

As of Friday evening, the city had not yet named the victim. Fox 29 reported that his family had identified him as Bryheem Barr.

The reporter, Robert Moran, followed the Inquirer’s practice of deleting the victim’s race from the story, even though the Philadelphia Police Department provide it. Of course, the tweet Mr Moran embedded in the story told readers that Mr Barr was black. I wonder if, by disclosing that kind of information, whether Mr Moran will get in trouble!

By March 10 last year, Philadelphia had 92 homicides. The city had a total of 562 homicides in 2021, breaking the previous record of 500 killings reported in 1990.

For comparison, New York City had 488 homicides for all of last year. As of last weekend, the city reported 67 killings so far in 2022.

Chicago this week also reached 100 homicides for the year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Mr Moran might have made a better comparison had he noted the populations of New York and Chicago, compared to Philly. The Big Apple had 8,804,190 residents, while the Windy City had a population of 2,746,388; the City of Brotherly Love had 1,603,797 souls in the 2020 census. Chicago is 71 percent larger than Philly, with the same number of killings, while New York City is 5¼ times Philly’s size, and has a third fewer total killings.

There had been ‘only’ 96 homicides on March 11, 2021, a jump from 92 the previous day, which means that Philly’s 100^th murder is ‘only’ a 4.17% increase over last year; had the homicide been counted on Thursday, when Mr Barr was shot, it would have been an 8.70% increase.

How does this work out? There are different ways to do the statistics, the simplest being the number of homicides divided by the number of days in the year, 70, to come up with a homicide pace of 1.4286 per day, multiplied by 365, projecting to 521.42 homicides for the year. A more complicated way is to take the number of homicides on the 70^th day of the year in 2021, and find that 17.08% of 2021 homicides had occurred by March 11, 2021, and, using that number, project that 2022 will see 585.48 killings.

I started this article Friday evening, but, as I was running the numbers through my head, I realized that I was doing what others have done: I had reduced Bryheem Barr to a number. Fox29 had a story on him:

‘He didn’t deserve this’: Man slain in Philadelphia’s 100th homicide was “hardworking” father, fiancé

Published March 11, 2022 | 6:30 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA – Authorities believe a Philadelphia father and soon-to-be husband was shot and killed during an attempted robbery Thursday night to become the city’s 100th homicide so far this year.

Family members say 28-year-old Bryheem Barr was walking to his car to go to work just before 11 p.m. near the intersection of North 53rd and Arch streets when the deadly shooting happened.

According to police, Barr was found shot multiple times and driven to Penn Presbyterian Hospital by officers where he died.

A police source told FOX 29’s Kelly Rule that they believe the deadly shooting happened during a robbery and the shooter took Barr’s legally-owned firearm.

One thing we know: if Mr Barr had a “legally-owned firearm,” he was not a convicted felon, and he had gone through the hassle of getting a permit in Philadelphia. This was not a case of one gang banger offing another, the way so many murders in the city happen.

Another is that he was going to work, obviously night shift somewhere.

Barr was a father of three and was soon to be married. His family said he was studying to become a nurse.

“Hardworking, bothers nobody, will give you the shirt off his back will do anything for his family, he wouldn’t hurt a soul,” Lorriane Barr, Bryheem’s aunt said.

There’s a bit more at the original, and that bit more is more than the Inquirer had on its website.

What did the Inquirer have? Yet another story on Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old punk kid to took a shot at the Philadelphia Police, and paid the ultimate price for it. Even as sympathetic to young Mt Siderio as the Inquirer could be, the story couldn’t help but disclose that:

• In 2021, police “were searching a house where he was living after receiving a tip that he’d pulled a gun during a large fight at Second and Porter Streets in South Philadelphia. They found clothes matching a photo taken at the scene, but no gun.”
• “In recent Instagram posts, TJ could be seen in a ski mask, and there are several references to guns and drug use.”
• “’He had a tendency to follow the wrong kind of kids,’ said Terry Elnicki-Varela, who works in special education and started helping TJ at school three years ago. ‘He was no angel. Far from it.’”
• Young Mr Siderio had been failed by both parents. His father who is currently in prison, and “previously spent at least a year in prison in Philadelphia” on a prior conviction, while his mother, Desirae Frame, also has a criminal record, with two drug cases and other arrests for theft, forgery, contempt of court, and receiving stolen property. The son is noted, in the article, as primarily living with a grandmother, but also living with a great-aunt.

Yes, he had a rough life, and little chance of improving it, but he was still a punk.

Mr Barr? If the Inquirer is working on a story to humanize the victim of the city’s milestone homicide, at least as of 8:49 this morning, it hasn’t been published. Instead, the paper is trying their best to excoriate the Philadelphia Police Department, something which can only lead to more killings in the city.

Mr Barr, at least as far as we know — there’s always a risk in taking just the family’s word for things — was a working man, and a law-abiding Philadelphian. For the Inquirer, his story isn’t an important one, save that he hit a certain number in the liquidation lottery. No, the paper would rather spend time and money trying to make a martyr out of a young punk.

I had already known that this was a bloody weekend in the City of Brotherly Love, thanks to this tweet from former United States Attorney and Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain:

I will not stand for this as Governor. I will do whatever it takes to bring safety to our neighborhoods.https://t.co/51bE6uDPxF

— Bill McSwain (@McSwainPA) March 6, 2022

I replied:

Of course, the @PhillyInquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and supposedly the region’s newspaper of record, will ignore most of this.

I was only partially right, as the Philadelphia Inquirer did have one story on the killing:

Three killed in West Oak Lane shooting

Police responded to reports of gunfire at the intersection of Cedar Park Avenue and Haines Street on Saturday night.

by Jenn Ladd | Sunday, March 6, 2022

Three men were killed in a shooting in the city’s West Oak Lane section late Saturday, police said.

I normally quote the first four paragraphs of a story, but had I done so this time, I would have quoted the entire story. Three lives taken, two men in their twenties, and a third in his thirties, all shot multiple times, all dead at the scene, none named, and their lives, and deaths, reduced to four paragraphs in the Inquirer.

Though the Philadelphia Police Department specified that all three victims were black males, the Inquirer’s story only told us that the victims were male. I would say that I wonder why that is, but I really don’t.

That was just three of the killings. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is normally updated only Monday through Friday, during normal business hours, so I was surprised to find, on Saturday morning, that it had been updated, to indicate 88 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Friday, March 4^th, up one from the previous day. It was not updated on Sunday, but this morning showed the seven more, 95 lives cut short by bullets or blades, on the 65^th day of the year. On the same date in 2021, ‘only’ 86 people had been murdered, and ‘just’ 67 in 2020.

To put that in perspective, 2020 saw 499 homicides, which was, at the time, the second highest total ever, topped only by the 500 homicides in 1990, in the midst of the crack cocaine wars. 2021 blew those records out of the water, hitting 500 murders on the day before Thanksgiving, and finishing the year with a staggering 562.

And 2022 is now 9 killings ahead of last year’s bloody pace. What a fine job Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have done!

As a bit of a numbers geek, I did the math, and if the current rate of increase over 2021 is maintained over the rest of the year, Philadelphia is on track for 622 homicides this year! Donald Trump has been out of office for well over a year, COVID-19 restrictions are almost gone, the economy is doing well enough that workers are in demand, all of the excuses that the left used to blame the homicide rate on anything other than bad people doing bad things are gone.